Spies Coming in From the Cold

The trickle of news continues on whether Poland operated secret prisons for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. The latest: a former Polish senior government official in radio interviews Wednesday came pretty close to confirming that the CIA did operate a prison here – although he didn’t use the word “prisoners,” he spoke instead of “passengers” of secret flights operated by the CIA.

Despite an attempt to muddle his words later, the statements from Tadeusz Iwinski, a secretary of state in charge of international affairs at the administration of Poland’s Prime Minister Leszek Miller in 2001-2004, go further than any other previous official comment on Poland’s role as a transit point for CIA captives.

Mr. Iwinski emphasized in two radio interviews on Wednesday that the prisoners were held in Poland for a short time. He said prisoners were brought to a secluded intelligence base in Kiejkuty, northeastern Poland, operated by the Polish authorities and the CIA, part of which were turned over to the CIA for exclusive use.

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“For sure there were centers, mainly in Kiejkuty, where for some time — hard to say how long, several days, or a dozen or so days — passengers could have been kept who arrived on airplanes used by the CIA from Afghanistan or Morocco or from other places,” Mr. Iwinski told the Polish public radio.

In a separate interview with private radio station TOK FM, Mr. Iwinski tried to backtrack on his remarks for the public radio and seemed displeased with the use of the word “prison” to describe the facility.

But without doubt the CIA operated airplanes to the Polish intelligence facility as part of the cooperation between Polish and U.S. intelligence services, he said.

“As far as I know, for many years there’s been a training facility of the Polish intelligence in Kiejkuty, and that beyond any doubt there was a cooperation agreement between our intelligence and the U.S. intelligence, and that CIA airplanes landed as part of that cooperation. I don’t deny that under the agreement some part of the training facility was separated to be used by CIA agents,” he said.

“It can’t be ruled out as well that as part of that agreement some passengers of the airplanes flying in from Afghanistan or Morocco may have stayed at the facility for the time when the airplanes were on the ground,” he added.

His words are in reaction to a report in Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that, without citing sources, said Poland’s former leaders, Aleksander Kwasniewski, president in 1995-2005, and Leszek Miller, prime minister in 2001-2004, may stand trial for war crimes before the State Tribunal, a rarely-used special court designed to try Poland’s top officials.

Polish authorities have repeatedly denied the existence of any CIA detainment facility in Poland.

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